A Proper Pea-Souper – The Terrible London Smog of 1952

.

A nether sky of fog…

The model Julie Harrison

On Saturday 6 December 1952 the performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells was abandoned at the interval. The incessant coughing of the audience had become intolerable due to the dense ‘pea-souper’ smog which had been slowly creeping into the auditorium making the stage almost invisible to the people who had sat further back.

Further west across London the greyhound racing at White City was halted when the dogs couldn’t see the hare, and reportedly a Mallard duck flying blindly across London smashed into Victoria station and crash-landed onto platform 6.

Before the dense fog had enveloped London the weather for the previous few weeks had been colder than normal. Houses throughout the capital, in those pre-central heating days, were burning large amounts of coal in a million fires and stoves – all of which were emitting a particulate-ridden sulphurous acidic smoke.

Although it had been cold, the weather had been relatively fresh and clear but by Thursday 4 December the conditions began to worsen. The breezes stopped and the skies became greyer and the atmosphere noticably dank.

By the next day the whole city had started to appear like a scene from Dickens’ Bleak House:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city…Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

The fog on that Friday morning was thicker than anyone could remember even by people who had long considered the London smog just another aspect of living in the capital. Incidentally the portmanteau smog was coined only forty five years earlier, by HA Des Voeux, who first used it in 1905 to describe the conditions of fuliginous (sooty) fog that occurred all too often in the capital city.

The unpleasant impermeable fogs had been a feature of London for centuries and it wasn’t just Dickens who wrote about, as he would call it, the London Particular. Descriptions of the London fogs can be found in the Sherlock Holmes’s stories and in Louis Stephenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The mythical quality of the London fog was reflected in practically any Hollywood film set in London even many years after the era of the London ‘pea-soupers’ had passed. Indeed the great smog of 1952 was the beginning of the end of the eye-stinging London Particulars.

By nightfall on Friday 5 December the smothering fog thickened and visibility in most of London dropped to a few metres. During the next day the sun was too weak and low in the sky to make much of an impression on the fog and that night, and on the Sunday and Monday nights, it again thickened. In most of London it was almost impossible for pedestrians, totally disorientated through lack of familiar landmarks, to find their way home.

Because of the dirt and the vile, clogging, unpleasant taste of the smog, many people held ‘masks’ of gauze, scarves or handkerchiefs to their faces. On the Isle of Dogs, almost surrounded by the Thames, visibility was occasionally officially reported to be nil – the fog was so dense that people could not see their own feet.

Hospitals were soon filled with patients suffering from acute respiratory diseases and, almost un-noticed, deaths in the city began to mount. No one noticed at first until undertakers started to run out of coffins and florists were running out of flowers. The very ill weren’t helped by ambulances searching in vain for victims and clanging their bells frantically while unable to extricate themselves from the snail-paced traffic jams.

This London smog, compared with a normal fog or even other urban smogs, was especially lethal after the war because it contained high quantities of sulphur oxides from the cheap sulphurous coal (the better quality hard coal was being exported) that reacted with the moisture in the air to produce a diluted, but lung-corrosive, sulphuric acid mist. The killer brew, to some people, triggered massive inflammation of the lungs – in other words thousands of people were dying almost through suffocation.

The British Committee on Air Pollution finally estimated that during the five days that the smog smothered London there were 4,000 more deaths than would have occurred under normal circumstances. During the next two months it was thought another 8,000 deaths were caused by a direct result of the killer smog. Even during the next summer the death rate was 2% higher than normal.

Legislation followed the Great Smog of 1952 in the form of the City of London (Various Powers) Act of 1954 and the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968. These Acts banned emissions of black smoke and decreed that residents of urban areas and operators of factories must convert to smokeless fuels.

Nothing on the scale of the 1952 Great Peasouper has ever occurred again and it remains the nation’s worst single air pollution disaster. There has been an astonishing hundred-fold reduction in atmospheric particulate levels in London over the last fifty years and the air, in most respects, is cleaner in the capital city than at any other time since the middle ages.

British Government film from the late 1940s about the dangers of pollution.

This entry was posted
on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 8:08 pm and is filed under London.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

59 Responses to “A Proper Pea-Souper – The Terrible London Smog of 1952”

I think this is among the most vital info for me.
And i’m glad reading your article. But should remark on few general things, The web site style is wonderful, the articles is really great : D. Good job, cheers

I can actually remember a more dense fog from my childhood in the industrial steel town of Falkirk in Scotland circa 1959, where my hand actually disappeared from sight at the end of my outstretched arm. I was 9 years old. I actually had to feel my way home after school. It was dark as well and I could only see the dim glow from the street lights once I came right up against them.

For the casual reader – it is always completely dark in winter in Scotland at school closing time. Luckily I only lived about half a mile from school !

[...] (kind of)…and sunny (kind of). The day started with what looked like a pea-souper to rival the London Smog of 1952. By midday however, the sun in all it’s majesty had managed to burn it off so that people [...]

[...] At White City, the greyhound racing was halted when the dogs couldn’t see the hare, and “reportedly a Mallard duck flying blindly across London smashed into Victoria station and crash-landed onto [...]

I remember walking to school with a scarf wrapped around my face. I remember having nasty bronchitis coughs. At one time (early childhood) I was hospitalized. Once the clean air act came into being I never had any more problems.